The title _De oratore_ exactly expresses the subject. Cicero is discussing rhetoric, indeed; he is writing _de arte oratoria_; but always, as Aristotle in his first book, from the point of view of the speaker. It is worth insisting on that the practitioner here coincides with the philosopher, and both with the theory and practise of rhetoric in the best days of the ancient tradition. The training of the public speaker, this tradition consistently repeats, must focus the whole training of the man. The vice of the teaching of rhetoric in its decadence under the Empire[3] was so to pervert this principle as to make all training subordinate to technical skill in rhetoric; and indeed the principle has this danger of making the whole man serve rhetoric, instead of making rhetoric bring out the whole man. None the less the principle rightly conceived is fruitful; and no one has shown this more persuasively than Cicero. The form is obviously the Platonic dialogue. The protagonists are the famous orators Crassus and Antonius, with Scævola, Cotta, Catulus, and Sulpicius as minor interlocutors. Whatever basis there may have been in the actual conversations of these historical persons,[4] the work, like its model, is fiction. It is dramatic in representing the speakers as _personæ_; but its imaginative realization goes no further. The literary device of the dialogue is used only to add concreteness to the discussion of what is always dry when it is abstract. The object is the discussion, not even incidentally the men who discuss. They talk always as orators and to promote oratory; and as orators they proceed from point to point. Plato’s _personæ_ are realized more dramatically. Though only Socrates is created fully, the others emerge as individuals. The movement of a Platonic dialogue is far more conversational. Not only does its form give the illusion of actual talk; its thought moves hither and yon, suggesting rather than concluding, seeking yet other approaches and departures, not marching but questing. Cicero raises questions, indeed, but as they are raised by the public speaker who has predetermined the answer and the stages by which we are to reach it. For all the ease and skill of its dialogue, _De oratore_ proceeds by paragraphs as definitely as _De lege Manilia_.